that is the deficit. you take the sum total of those annual deficits and enter oast on them and that creates the national debt which right now is about 16.4 and change trillion dollars. now, the u.s. treasury is empowered to borrow money to make up the shortfall between revenue and expenses, the deficit. but only up to a certain limit. that's the debt ceiling. treasury does not make decisions about how the money is spent. they are simply empowered in this case to write the checks to pay the bills that are already incurred by your democratically elected congress. now that we've hit the debt limit, exceeded it a little bit, the treasury has two options. they can fiddle around with $200 billion the way you would if you're a little short on your monthly bills, paying some now, refinancing a little bit. that would get us through mid-february to early march. once that stops working the treasury needs to rely on the cash it has on hand and the revenue that comes in each day from taxes. problem is there isn't alw